


perpetuity

by artreactor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Developing Relationship, Domestic, Earth C (Homestuck), Happy Ending, Insecurity, M/M, PTSD, Semi-Canon Compliant, autistic jake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 06:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12835047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artreactor/pseuds/artreactor
Summary: "Call it a car crash waiting to happen, you’ll just call it your downfall"Dirk is a romantic, just not a particularly optimistic one.





	perpetuity

**Author's Note:**

> I had to stop writing because I got to 10000 exactly. How whack.
> 
> I say "semi-canon compliant" because I entirely forgot that Tavros lives with them. In fact, I forgot Tavros exists. I'm a terrible fan, as you can tell. 
> 
> This deals predominately with Dirk's abandonment issues and Jake's PTSD surrounding the game and surrounding the events of canon. Jake's issues are dealt with vaguely but may still be upsetting to some readers so be careful. 
> 
> Other than that, this is just an excuse to write DirkJake fluff/introspective. I can't believe I haven't written a one-shot in over two years! I have so many unfinished ones though...
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! Also note that I listened to "Endlessly" by The Cab on repeat for this whole fic so give it a listen, it might set the mood.

 

As the dubiously self-sufficient child of a revolutionary martyr, you learned to rely on a strict martial regimen.

You didn’t exactly sleep, but if you focused, which the nature of your precarious existence often forced you to do beyond your juvenile means, you rigorously assigned times and deadlines and quotas to every aspect of your rather mundane childhood. Fish would be caught before sunset every four days. Connection cables would be checked dutifully every second nightfall, when venturing to the roof was least dangerous. Dinner would be prepared, partially from a can, once your stomach had gurgled in protest for the third time, fully distracting you.

And every year, on your birthday, you would pry open the floorboard at the foot of your bed and recover the appropriately labelled flash drive for your age.

You’d watched each of the videos recorded one hundred times over, swaddled almost embarrassingly in blankets in your desk chair, hunkered close to the screen. When you were seven, you were told to be wary of the dangers lurking outside your secluded block; warned of peril in the way you’d have possibly been taught the safe cross code if only you were born earlier. Aged eleven, you were finally given the context and you ate it up, solitary and starved of a purpose and so willing to engage in whatever principle you could as a distraction. It hardened you for a cause you’d already been fighting your whole life, but it gave you a reason and an idol beyond your then sole connection to humanity.

Often you preferred the earlier recordings. The ones where your brother fumbled through trying to explain reading to you for a half hour before remembering that you must have already read the label on the recording and marvelling your presumed intelligence. It always made you puff up like a pigeon. You taught yourself to read before you were three. Sometimes you fell asleep, curled in your duvet like a real child instead of strange, isolated hardwire, listening to your brother enthusiastically recite strange rhymes as if he held love for a charge he’d never even met.

You were diligent in retrieving them every year, always nervously anticipating your next present even hundreds of days before you would allow yourself to peek. They burned a hole through the plywood of your floor and drove you silly as you feigned sleep for no one in particular at night.

On your thirteenth birthday, you reached in and realised there was only one flash drive left.

It struck you out of nowhere and you found yourself blindly fumbling around in the expanse of empty space, looking for at least the knowledge that next year’s gift existed. You found nothing, however, and took the thirteenth flash drive in confusion and an impending sense of dread. You prepared for the worst as you slotted it in. The potential of being greeted with your brother’s bloodied, haggard face, thinly stretching out his dwindling days under the regime, or learning of some foreboding prophecy about to take its hold worried you greatly.

But the film went by normally. A little longer than the others, with empty spaces full of your brother’s incessant rambling, even a little more than he was prone to do. He was freshly shaven, uninjured and unperturbed. The confusion settled sick in your stomach, like the delirium and queasiness of uncooked bird meat.

At the end, your brother simply said, “I’m no good with goodbyes. Good luck out there, kid."

You never watched any of the other tapes again. Instead, you tried to piece together, through the constant fog of quarantine that had never quite felt as heavy when you’d had the videos, why your brother ran out of words for you.

  
  


(later on, in passing conversation, you mention it to dave. “i don’t know man,” he says carefully, “we were deep in shit at that age. so deep, we were wading in paradoxical game mechanic feces up to our knees like some sort of dairy farmer frat initiation process. move over, skaia, we’ve got a new foe tearing it up inside us and its hookworm.”

“you think he just assumed i’d be gone?”

“i can’t say that. maybe i was just a piece of shit. maybe none of us had any business raising kids.” he runs his fingers through his hair as you try your best not to physically sink into the grass. “it’s a pretty big commitment. i don’t know if i could do it for real, you know? maybe none of us are built for it.”

you give it a year and then dave, through minimal insistence, becomes as enamoured with the wiggling infants created deep in the caverns as anyone else has been. you pretend it doesn’t feel like a punch to the stomach.)

  
  


“I think a man could get used to this,” Jake announces, straddling your chest in an inconvenient way that means you both have to strain to press your lips together.

“What, me being under you?” you say in reply, raising an inquisitive eyebrow that implies much more. “Well damn, didn’t take you as being so forward. A guy could get used to that too.”

Jake goes beet red in an instant and swats your shoulder, nervous chuckling rising in the back of his throat. He’s awkward and bumbling every time you so much as make an innuendo and you’ve no idea how you’d ever manage to go any further than the admittedly enthusiastic over clothes fumbling you have been entertaining yourselves with, but you’d be lying if you said you weren’t eager to find out at some point. “I mean _company_ , Strider. Gadsbudlikins, I swear you could drive the point back to nefarity if I was discussing the benefits of little green apples!”

“Well, you know what they say about little green apples.”

His face wrinkles up with the intensity of barely holding back a snort. You wish he would, even if it’s just for the momentary vindication of succeeding in making him laugh. Not that it’s necessarily a rare occasion. You’re hardly the team clown but Jake has an almost boyish disposition and his boisterous nature often leads to rough tumbles and loud, uninhibited laughter. That’s something you could get used to hearing close up, instead of second-hand over a tinny radio connection as he recounts his day.

It’s almost dangerous how accustomed you’ve become to his company already. You’ve already established a side of the bed and learned to fitfully sleep to the lullaby of Jake’s heavy breathing. You form a somewhat healthier eating schedule around planning mealtimes with another party. Your projects are planned and completed to the sounds of him loading his pistols or the muffled sounds of wild shooting from his skulltop.

The warnings are glaring, like neon signs on a highway- attention: approaching cliff. Five hundred metres. One hundred. Fifty. Ten.

You wouldn’t dream of turning this car around. Call it a car crash waiting to happen, you’ll just call it your downfall. You’re satisfied just kissing the wrinkles out of Jake’s mouth. He has a wonderful habit of making you avoidant.

  
  


(“don’t you ever get _tired_ ,” jake asks, almost pleadingly, from the doorway. “i just feel like… friggin’ hell, don’t give me that look. i just feel like it’s all too much! come on, strider, you can’t honestly tell me that you’re not getting weary with this whole chewing the fat day in day out spiel? it _has_ to be doing your head in too!”

you don't tell him that you could never tire of company. that being alone for any stretch fills your chest, drowning you in your own echoed thoughts with nothing to break through. that you're frightened that one day, all of this will end and you'll be thrust back into the sea to drown or worse; be.

you especially don't tell him that you could never tire of _jake’s_ company. that your heart still seizes painfully whenever the lightning outside your window lays light across jake’s sleeping form for a split second; all it takes for an image memory of perfect credence to form. That your nightmares have changed their modus operandi to flashes of jake’s absence, deliberate or not.

that would be vulnerability beyond a level you could cope with. you're not willing to lay yourself bare when it could never change the fact that jake’s case of trademarked strider fatigue is growing and you can sense the resentment bubbling under his skin. what would regurgitating your guts on to the floor for jake to perform medical lepidopterology on you do?

jake should understand loneliness and if he doesn’t that just others you further.

your silence is honest, but final.)

  
  


You should be more than used to the radio silence. After one month of it, yes, but after a lifetime of it, it shouldn’t be so hard to deal with.

But you no longer have any way to fill up your days. You don’t remember to eat until your stomach claws at you, you can’t sleep without a warm presence in the bed beside you. When did you become so reliant on other people, let alone on one person in particular? It was truly a bad decision on your part, to allow loneliness to carve you into a desperate, pathetic child.

The knowledge of your shame does not stop you from double texting, or triple, rising into numbers that no longer have typical numerical value. It becomes the new shape on your cold mattress, the new comfort that can’t quite lull you to sleep.

You will eventually become accustomed to isolation again, but you don’t dare to let yourself think that you will not be permanently shaped by companionship.

  
  


(“it’s over, jake,” you say in a feeble attempt to snatch back the power you never knew you gave him. you take and take and take and take until there’s nothing left but jake’s vacant stare and the dull knowledge that tomorrow you’ll have hurt him. you don’t know how much and try not to care. your need to take back what he unintentionally stole from you and more, the control that should have surely and rightfully been yours from the beginning, overrides what little altruism you possess and you think not giving him the chance to see you vulnerable any more will make you feel better.

it makes you feel worse.)

  
  


You would say that Jake has taken to avoiding you, but it’s hardly an Earth-C specific development.

The last time you spoke beyond basic greetings and the interpretive dance you so often do around each other was before the entry. Your conversation was a weighty number of minutes of starched, stiff apologies from you and numerous hand gestures and insistences from him, ultimately leaving both of you with less closure than you had in the beginning.

“I shouldn’t have just _left_ , honestly Dirk, it was the coward’s way out and no man worth his salts should have treated a paramour so churlishly. I should have just _said_ something, but I was just-”

“You did say it,” you had replied, “I remember.”

“Oh.” He had curled his hand around his forearm, rubbing the sleeve of his unflattering leotard. “Maybe I should have been more...insistent?”

“I think you found out the hard way that I’m a pretty stubborn person. No one forewarned you that dating me was fucking Herculean. Slaying a lion and capturing boars were nothing compared to the shitshow I put you through. The real Labours were the ones of love, after all.”

Jake shifted, uncomfortable. “It’s not you.”

“It’s me.”

And of course, it was you. Because he freezes when you walk into a room, doesn’t speak as much when you’re nearby, and excuses himself from common room events. It’s peculiar how, even now, with more people around you than you’ve ever even known before, you feel more alone than ever too.

  
  


(you realise jake isn’t sleeping either when you bump into him in the kitchen at 3am one night.

his face is illuminated by the dim light of his phone screen and his eyes are wide and startled, caught in the act of eating handfuls of dry cereal straight from the box in the middle of the night. you’re not much better so, to vindicate him, you pull out a packet of digestives and munch your way through one, silently. he nods and you create a quiet bubble of understanding; liminal space with bare feet on kitchen tiles. though you ache to speak and ruin this, you simultaneously could stay like this forever and be satisfied if it means jake won’t run anymore.

“so why are you up?” he asks after an age, looking almost shyly under the flop of his undone bangs. there’s something weirdly domestic about it. you never felt like that when the press of danger weighed down on your chest in the game. you never had time to feel homely in your routine.

you just shrug instead. “sleeping isn’t exactly where my finest abilities are,” you say. it never has been, but you no longer have a solid reason.

jake just nods along. “i know,” he says, a little lost, “i’m finding it hard to even do that right these days.” there’s a small twinge in your chest for that. you think of all the times you stole moments of jake sleeping peacefully, without a toss or a turn or a flicker under his eyelids. you still haven’t spoken at length for you to know any specifics but it stirs something thick and dreadful within you that the game- you’re not quite self-centered enough to believe it’s all down to you- has taken this away from him.

you approach him, cautiously, like approaching a deer caught mesmerised in the headlights. he stiffens and visibly forces himself to relax before you pause, close but not touching. you reach into the box and inexplicably pull out a horseshoe shape and pop it into your mouth. that earns you the smallest smile imaginable but it’s still strong enough to make your heart ache.

you don’t touch him when you lead him to the sofa and you allow him to swaddle himself in his blankets alone. instead, you settle at the arm of the sofa, present but not imposing, and allow him to drift off fitfully. his eyelids flutter and he tosses and he turns, but he sleeps. it’s all you can do for now.)

  
  


“I think I need a break,” Jake says, stirring some actual milk into his cereal this time.

It’s 6am and it’s been three weeks since you started wordlessly meeting him in the kitchen after everyone else goes to bed. No one said anything about either of you being missing from your quarters, not that you expected anyone to check on _you_ , and no one’s mentioned the pile of blankets you’ve left folded up beside the sofa. You’d invite him to your room, let him take your bed while you provide whatever comfort your presence seems to offer from a distance. It’s not like you’ve slept in your bed yet anyway. But it seems too familiar an offer, too precarious. As if the sheer offer could shatter this silent agreement you have going all the more quickly because it’s a very well known fact that you’re damn good at shattering things.

“Ah,” you acknowledge, forgetting yourself and swigging the orange juice straight out of the carton. It’s as nonchalant an action you can manage when your heart feels dangerously close to being torn out of your chest again.

Jake looks at you witheringly. “It’s not you, you know,” he says and the doubt must be evident on your face, no matter how impassive you aim to make it. “It’s not! It’s just well.”

He sighs and presses himself into the corner of the counter as Jade slips into the room. She’s the only other person who could get up this early and, luckily enough, she has impeccable atmosphere reading abilities all things considered. She greets you with a smile it’s far too early for before grabbing a slice of toast off your plate and leaving. You’re kind of scared of her, after she punched you and after what happened with you and Jake, so you daren’t even say anything against her in jest.

“It’s not you,” he repeats and you drain the last of the orange carton, tossing it into what you assume is a recycling bag. It’s large, blue, and full of cardboard waste. Your observation skills know no bounds even if your social skills wane. “At least not specifically.”

“Jake, it’s fine,” you start but Jake interrupts you.

“It’s not fine!” he insists, hands moving this way and that. “Everyone else is settling in here and I just feel like an extra left boot. It’s like everyone else knows their place and is getting on swimmingly and I’m just-- not! Not swimming, I’m barely managing a measly doggy paddle and damn it, Strider, my arms are getting tired!”

You can’t begin to fully understand how Jake is feeling, of course. Yes, you have no idea how to socialise properly. You’ve been too quiet entering rooms and too loud too close to the wrong people. You have a bruise on your temple to show for it and an attitude that gets more and more withdrawn with every passing day. Social interaction with a hoard of traumatised teenagers is like navigating a minefield and you’re never quite sure what’s going to set someone off, what’s going to make someone look at you with a blank, whited look in their eyes and it’s draining.

But at the same time, you are utterly terrified of being left to your own devices. Even when the possibility of having a sword drawn on you is very high if you don’t figure out how to handle yourself, it’s a worthy investment if it means that you’ll potentially be offered human interaction. The idea of it ever being _too_ draining for you to handle is an entirely foreign concept. Why else would you force your presence on to other people, regardless of whether or not they desire it, in a desperate man’s attempt to create a solidarity he can eagerly consume.

No, you don’t understand at all.

“I understand,” you lie and now it’s Jake’s turn to look at you with doubt. “A break sounds like it would be good for you, bro.”

“A break from everyone,” Jake clarifies, weakly.

A break from you, you think.

  
  


(“this isn’t about you,” he says as he’s leaving. everything he’s bringing fits in his sylladex but he still wears a rucksack over his shoulder that contains a bottle of water and a rain jacket.

“you’ve said that,” you say wryly, because he has and because you’re tired hearing it when you can’t believe it.

“i guess it’s just,” he trails off before sighing. “how am i supposed to know if i like adventure anyway if i’ve never really tried it?”

“haven’t we had plenty of adventure?” you say and you don’t mean it to sound bitter but it does because of who you are as a fundamentally flawed, miserable person.

“this isn’t about you,” he repeats and you let him go.)

  
  


While Jake is gone, your group of merry tragedies disbands entirely.

As it turns out, having eleven certifiably messed up kids under one roof isn’t the safest or most beneficial way to do things. Dave is the one to leave first, with Karkat, and you narrowly resist the urge to follow them, predominantly because you’re fairly sure he needs to get away from you and your constant suffocating, aggrieving presence. Then Rose leaves with Kanaya, in search of a better location to wait out their quest to obtain the creatures some of you (who can be trusted) might call children, which seems redundant now that the troll population appears to be flourishing regardless. It's clearly important to Kanaya though and, by proxy, to Rose.

Everyone else disperses to far corners of the city over the following weeks. You're the last person to leave, before Jade and John who decide to stay; Jade, for her plants that she's begun cultivating, and John, since it's his house, even big and empty. You take the hint Jade gives you one morning as you're disassembling the coffee machine and remaking it for the third time this week.

“You need to get out,” she says.

“You're not subtle,” you reply, trying to keep your unreasonable offence strictly ironic.

She laughs, the noise an almost comical bark, as she leans over the kitchen island, propped on her elbows. “I meant outside. Like, hobbies. Do you not see your friends any more?”

You don't. Jane moved out with her dad soon after Rose and Kanaya. She told you in confidence that she felt her father's constant presence was making John jumpy and that much you understood. Her father had never really forgiven any of your posse for your various misadventures as Jane's friends however, and you feel uncomfortable imposing on their suburban family life. Roxy made no attempt to bring you with her when she left with Calliope a few weeks prior and you're happier for it. The idea of being in close proximity to her in any semblance of domesticity sounds like opening a particularly dangerous can of worms; ones with razor teeth and loose lips.

And Jake hasn't called. Or messaged. Or even sent a postcard. Though you hang on to the fact that at least it appears to be universal lack of contact from him and not you specifically.

It's not about you, you have to remember that.

“I was thinking of getting my own place anyway,” you say, dodging the question entirely.

It doesn't go unnoticed. Jade sighs, mouth pulled into a thin little line. “Someone told me once that you don't need to be alone. I mean, that applies to everyone, even you.”

“Even me,” you repeat, screwing in the final bolt. It seems unlikely. It's more believable that you'd be the exception that proves the rule.

You get to work on finding your own place in the immediate hours afterwards. It's relatively easy, your godhood considered, and after a few days your own slice of Strider aesthetic is looking as put together as anywhere you reside ever is.

You keep a spare room unfurnished, despite your urges. Just in case.

  
  


(when you open the door, he’s standing on the porch step in the rain. he’s drenched to his skin, the thick wool of his cardigan matted and clinging to his wrists and the hem of his shorts dripping water down his thighs and into his bright yellow galoshes.

“jake?” you say, surprised.

“fuck adventure,” he answers and throws his arms around you.)

  
  


Jake settles into your house about as well as he settles in anywhere. He doesn’t question why you have a spare room with nothing but a bed in it but by the end of the week he has the walls covered with pictures and printed off screenshots and even the occasional blueprint. You find yourself awkwardly hovering outside his door, watching him as he concentrates fully on making sure the posters go up and stay up, with sticky tape folded over itself in order to limit the damage done to the paper.

The tune he hums as he works is for your benefit alone. You can see his eyes aren’t in it, above dark circles like he hasn’t slept in weeks. Which is entirely plausible.

You go outside to message Jade to ask if John did anything to Jake’s room in the communal house and she promptly informs you that there was nothing to do to it. Jake never slept there, never made any effort to create his own space. The room was bare when he left.

That doesn’t make you feel any better and you continue to hover, just far enough away from him at all times that you hope you won’t impose on him but close enough that you can see what he’s doing and worry yourself about all of it. Jake’s scared and, like anyone who is scared, doesn’t want to be alone in complete contrast to everything you’ve gleaned about Jake up until now. This is going to fall apart, you can already sense it in your bones.

But you let him continue on for the time being and say nothing. Posters won’t be that hard to take down.

  
  


(six days after jake comes back, you finally speak to him with a purpose outside of meaningless small talk. “you know,” you start, waiting to continue until he looks up from where he’s marking a particular crude design with a red marker, “there are loads of places around.”

jake peers at you, eyes squinting from behind his glasses. “is that so,” he says, but doesn’t phrase it as a question.

“yeah, i mean, i found it pretty easy to get this place.” you gesture around the room awkwardly. “mayor practically handed it to me on a silver platter. i guess it’s some condition of godhood sburb never told us about. normal housing regulations don’t apply. not that we’ve exactly set up a council yet but i’m pretty sure if we did we’d be given a shit tonne of leeway. at least that’s what i figured when they handed me a house like capitalism and communism had a love child called free real estate.”

the silence stretches out once you stop rambling. jake is watching you with a funny look on his face that makes your stomach churn uncomfortably. “i can leave if you want,” he says, quietly. it’s the kind of statement that should still be said full-gusto, accompanied by jake’s typical, over the top gesticulation. but it isn’t and it makes your heart hurt. “it was never my intention to impose.”

“no, that’s not--” you pinch the bridge of your nose and try to find the even ground that is reassurance without begging. “you’re not imposing. i just meant you have other options if this isn’t chill for you. there’s no one i’d rather room with, personally

jake pauses, clearly mulling over what you’ve said. “then hush up,” he says, finally.

  
  


After one night alone, Jake determines it’s the far easier option for him to sleep with you.

It’s the easier option for him, that is. You’re unsure of what comfort your presence gives him but it is evidently enough that he’s able to sleep through the night with limited fits or obstructions. He still tosses and turns and makes wretched noises, but there’s nothing you can do to help him. You try on several occasions to wrap your arms around him, only for you to be pushed back as he thrashes out of your grasp.

He won’t tell you what happened. He freezes up and goes cold over mugs of tea that he never drank before when you ask and then looks at you with the saddest look you think he can muster. You don’t press it any more. There’s things you don’t want to talk about too and you think you’ve both covered the basics in what needs to be communicated.

In the days, Jake typically disappears. He wakes shortly before you and pours you a bowl of dry cereal before slipping out the door with a remorseful expression, as if leaving you alone for a few hours is akin to locking you up. It’s understandable, given your track record. But there’s plenty for you to do around, even if none of it’s particularly useful. You sweep, you nail up shelves, you fix the hinges on the door from where Roxy thought it was funny to kick it in at her forcibly imposed housewarming. You even drag out a rusted watering can to use over the patches of grass where Jake insisted he planted seeds. You’re hardly a herbologist, especially given as watering is the closest you’re ever going to get to getting your hands dirty, but you don’t feel it’s a good sign that after weeks they show no signs of sprouting.

But, like with other things, you hold out hope that they will grow.

  
  


(“the rose grew,” jake says one morning, where he’s stayed behind uncharacteristically late.

you look up from your coffee mug, eyebrows raising from behind your shades. following him outside proves that jake is in fact correct. though there are leaves and tendrils splitting from the other patches of dirt you’ve watered, the rose in particular appears to have grown overnight, its petals opening solemnly in the dawn sun. you hunker down beside it, but mostly watch as jake’s expression transforms into something almost smug.

“i have some blueprints too that i’d like you to look over,” he says, confident but transparent. his confidence only goes as far as being confident that he needs your confirmation. he wanted you to come outside to make sure the rose really had grown.

“if that would help,” you answer, because you won’t ever refuse.

he smiles, a little crookedly and not quite wide enough to be signature. there’s something blue in it. “a rose and an invention all in the one day,” he muses, “i better be careful. someone might mistake me for useful.”

your breath catches in your throat and, without thinking, you place your hand over his on the grass as you both squat beside the flower. he pauses, tensing before relaxing under you, and lets a shaky, whistled breath through his nose. “it would be,” you test, after silently trying to wrap the words around your tongue like a rabid fever, breaking all sense in coherent thought, “a mistake for them to think that matters. in the long run, i mean.”

you think it’s come out wrong, that jake hasn’t quite understood what you were trying to force past your lips. his face is blank, almost in confusion. then he turns his hand palm up and squeezes his fingers around yours.

“i think i’ll plant another,” he replies; a non-answer, but telling all the way.)

  
  


It’s a year later that you’re invited to Rose and Kanaya’s wedding.

The year flies by quicker than any year ever could when you were alone. Even when Jake often still disappears in the middle of the day, you occupy yourself in ways that could have never sufficed to ease time if you were truly alone. And Jake, for some unfathomable reason, has yet to realise on one of these day trips that he could simply disappear and never come back and maybe, this once, you would be able to restrain yourself long enough so as not to hunt him down to the ends of the earth. You like to think you're maturing, if only by halves to become some fallacy of a human being.

You assume Jake is maturing too. You’ve managed to glean considerable information from him about what happened while you were preoccupied. You understand why Jane doesn’t come over to visit now and why Jake refuses point blank to clean the bottom cupboard, or under the bed, or the toilet. You work around it instead. Jane meets you in coffee shops on her lunch break from her school work. You make Jake a feather duster and watch, from your knees by the bottom cupboard, as he happily gets to work cleaning the fridge.

You understand why Jake trips over his own worth. You’d always suspected his gusto and self-assurance was a bit of a fallacy; at the end of the day, you were all teenagers and none of you could be as secure as the masks you strapped onto your faces. But Jake’s doubt falls deeper, from the direct driving force you’ve seen behind coming-of-age high school movies and from the faces of children on screens who had far more people around but just as little social opportunity. You eventually understand how Jake packed a childhood’s worth of bullying into three hours and realise that, between you, Jane, and someone you need to have words with, you’ve given Jake a triple whammy of self-confidence issues. You’re the only one who stuck around to fix it.

Sometimes he kisses you. Often, it’s so quick you’d think you’d imagined it if he wasn’t still sitting a few feet away, hands dancing nervously in his lap. More and more frequently, you catch him doing small things like leaning across a table to brush your bangs out of your eyes before breakfast, or catching your wrist with his whole hand, enthusiastic and consuming, when he needs your attention. They’re small victories but you revel like a beetle in mud at the littlest sign that he takes comfort in you.

A week after you’re invited to the wedding, Rose sits you down. They say stress ages people, gives them lines around their eyes and a crinkle in their brow. Sometimes, they say, major life events turn your hair grey overnight. You count yourself lucky to have yours at all.

But Rose looks even younger, if possible. She doesn’t look like a child, despite not really even being an adult. She has a glow in the height of her cheeks and a sparkle in her eye that doesn’t coincide with what you assume is the high stress of wedding planning.

“Kanaya is doing everything,” she says, a little wistfully, when you question it. “I may have initiated the talks myself but she’s entirely engrossed in the quaint customs of this whole human ritual. It would be a shame for me to distract her from it. She even asked if you would walk me down the aisle.”

You choke on your soda. There goes your hair, you think. “That’s uh,” you say, between fits of coughing, “The custom is rather antediluvian and-”

Rose looks at you, humoured. “You can calm down, I wasn’t planning on asking you. I think Dave would just about swallow his teeth.” She swirls her finger in her drink as you slowly regain your composure. “Besides, giving someone away implies they were ever yours to begin with. The implication that people are property aside, you’re not exactly my father in that retrospect, and no version of you was.”

“For anyone,” you tack on, looking down.

“For anyone,” she agrees.

  
  


(she tells you that, really, she just wanted jake to carry the rings. you were confused until she leaned forward and stage whispered, “she took the term ‘page boy’ very literally,” and the conversation ends with you snorting orange soda into your shirt sleeve and excusing yourself before you embarrass yourself further.

she also asks you to pick up the rings and you do, no questions asked. that and page watching duties are all you’re given for the wedding and it’s enough to satisfy your need for involvement without threatening to give you too much power. it’s entirely safe. it’s safe until you come face to face with a carapace jewellery store the evening before, staring in the front window at the rings laid out. you assume they’re expensive but money is still no object to you and it makes little sense. you also suspect rose didn’t even pay for these. you get away with a lot as a god.

the rings catch the sunlight and your eye, like a crow swooping down on a lost trinket. it’s less the jewellry itself- seeing as you wear none and rings would be the most impractical of all for a mechanic- and more the meaning behind it. the perfect little circle; never ending, never breaking.

it represents a unity that sits out of your reach, the ideal of which you convince yourself you have no interest in as you pick up the rings and hurry home.

you announce that you’ve got them, falsely exuberant, the moment you cross the threshold. just in case jake forgets the day that’s in it and sees them in your back pocket. you don’t want to crack your tiny piece of unity just yet.)

  
  


“I don’t dance,” you warn Jake as he tugs you between the chairs by the wrist. You also don’t wear suits or squeaky shoes, and you especially don’t slick your bangs back off your face. But today is an exception in a lot of ways and you’ve relented on the condition that you could pop your collar.

“It’s not like I’ve had much opportunity to either!” he says, laughing as he pulls you forward, crushing your chests together. “We can start together, but you can’t cast a kitten if I misstep, alright?”

“Alright,” you say. Now that you’re pressed together, you’d rather stay that way for as long as possible.

Jake steps on your toes so many times you lose track. The limp material of your shoes is thinner than you’re used to with trainers and boots and it’s an effort not to wince every time he presses his whole weight down onto you. He mumbles apologies into your ear each time and it’s a more dangerous effort to try to suppress the shiver that threatens to run through you each and every time his sound vibrates off the shell of it. You’re surprised he can’t feel the heat radiating off your face, surprised that it doesn’t make his hair fuzz with humidity like you’re sure yours will by the end of the night. Maybe he feels something because, a few moments after you begin mulling over this to the point of worry, he attempts to dip you right back.

You’re taller than him still, by two inches, but he’s been gaining on you and it’s nowhere near the full head you used to have on him when you were both fifteen. You’re not sure he has the upper body strength to hold you either and his arms shake with the effort of ensuring you don’t fall and hit your head. Your own arms instinctively fist in the back of his suit jacket, threatening to take him down with you.

But you don’t fall. Instead you look up into him as he stares, grinning and unfocused, at a spot somewhere on your nose, and watch the ceiling spin behind him and think you’re just a little more doomed than usual.

  
  


(that night, you tuck him in with difficulty as he slurs charming words into your ear, burbling happily as his fingers lock into the buttons of your shirt and tug you down with him.

“do you ever think about marriage, strider,” he murmurs and you freeze up.

“it’s an archaic custom,” you force out through your teeth, “it boils down to ownership. obviously rose and kanaya have their own ideals about it but where i stand it’s entirely irrelevant in a society where old human customs are a minority.”

he taps your nose, smugly through a haze of lime green and sugar. “dirk, that’s not what it is,” he insists. if he wasn’t still talking about this, you’d think he was sobering up, “it’s about -romance- and being together forever and ever. it’s a promise.”

“what an unfair promise to ask someone to make,” you say and something in your voice makes jake quieten down until the only sound he makes is the whistle of a snore through his nose. you could never make someone promise you that. your forever is too much to handle.)

  
  


Eventually, Jake finds his own adventure in the dubious manner in which he inherits Skaianet.

The change is slow, but phenomenal. Bit by bit, he makes larger and more extravagant creations. You offer your assistance more times than you can really bear to be rejected, but he’s insistent in doing everything for himself. Occasionally, he’ll bound into your workshop and leave a pile of welded metal and bolts on your table and let you do grunt work to stop you from going mad waiting to see the finished product. It tides you over; it sates your need to stay busy without feeding your desire to take control.

The projects overwhelm you and engulf you. A towering, monstrous time demon who can crush Sawtooth in the battlefield if not on the rap stage. A coffee machine that self-filters and self-refills, both with coffee and cups. A full rewiring of your house so he can make sure any coffee machines are turned off from his skulltop a hundred miles away.

Eventually, it grows out of even Jake’s laissez-faire control. You watch it grow larger than life, less physical than Jake’s face on a billboard, and swallow the jealousy threatening to crawl up from your throat.

You haven’t grown up. You’re still a control freak, an annoying teenager with a superiority complex, unable to accept that maybe your best friend is just as capable at robotics as you, unable to give him a chance to show you. You refuse to let it consume you though. If you’re jealous (which you are), you’re not going to tell him. You’re not going to let bitter creature claw its way up through your throat and threaten what he’s worked so hard for.

  
  


(instead, you come to him with blueprints.

“i’m not gonna claim that giving the coffee machine artificial intelligence would be a good idea,” you say, rolling it out across jake’s desk. jake stands up from his chair and peers over the table, eyes like saucers. “but arguably i could make an artificial intelligence for something more appropriate. englishbot is a cute, but dangerous choice. i’m more thinking the house. like, if you forget to turn something off you’re probably not gonna remember you forgot, right? i could use an artificial intelligence for that.”

jake is silent for a moment, running his fingers over your chalk drawings on the page. he’s smudging them slightly but the sweat pouring down the back of your neck is a more pressing priority. “do you want to be my partner?” he asks.

“your-” you start, worried.

“partner! my business partner!” he elaborates and you breathe out in relief. he rubs your upper arm with a knowing look. “you know, i was just waiting for you to come to me instead of trying to do it all on your lonesome.”

“like you’ve been doing?” you say, brows raised. he barks a laugh.

“i learned from the best,” he says and his wink makes your heart flutter.)

  
  


As a businessman, Jake is more pragmatic than you ever would have given him credit for.

As long as you’re present, cooly hammering through the smaller details of investor contracts and Earth-C copyright law, he can lay on the charm that’s usually reserved for stealing your heart like a thief in the night. In some ways, it’s relieving to know that he really is just spellbindingly charming and you’re not just a particularly weak-willed individual, ready to fall for the first boy to flutter his eyelashes at you. In other ways, it makes your chest seize to see him wink platonically across a boardroom table.

It would be a lie to say you’re not a jealous person. You’re consumed by a terrifying and slightly dangerous desire to steal Jake, much like he’s stole your heart, away in the night, keep him under a blanket fort in your living room and feed him heated marshmallows on a stick until he’s queasy with the sugar rush. You want to drag him under soft things until he’s away from prying eyes and you want to kiss away the charm in his smile until only your Jake is left; the Jake that was charming enough to sweep you off your feet but didn’t look so corporately polished.

It’s a page thing, you decide. It’s a defence mechanism and an act, but ultimately a harmless one. There’s no chance of it consuming him and turning him into his faux confidence.

So you swallow your worry and let yourself smile when you walk in on him practicing finger pistols in the bathroom mirror, and you stop feeling a sense of impending dread and the bubble of anger towards a system that encourages Jake- who still can’t get down on his knees long enough to clean under the fridge- to sell his charm. People come to terms with things in the most peculiar of ways, Jake perhaps the strangest of all.

He still holds your hand between his sweaty palms under boardroom tables.

  
  


(it’s an advertisement that makes you turn down familiar street corners again.

it’s the monster, clawing up and out of your throat, threatening to bubble out in front of someone who’ll notice. you’re not sure it’s particularly vitriolic at this stage, but it’s dangerous all the same. all it takes is one misstep with jake and this whole thing could come crumbling down on top of you both.

it doesn’t stop you from stopping outside the carapace jewellers and pressing your hands to the glass. the rings sparkle in the sunlight like they did two years prior. each one is different and catches your eye in a way a pattern never could but you can’t pinpoint the differences, or why they matter, in each.

you allow yourself to mull over the impossible. if it were possible that jake would ever wear a ring you bought, would he prefer a band or a stone? something dainty, silver and sparkling, or golden and solid? you’d know five years ago, but jake has weird ways of surprising you each day about his mercurial preferences. the advertisements make it glaringly obvious that his comfort lies outside of the machismo he bombarded you with as a young teenager and, honestly, you chide yourself for not having noticed it sooner.

it’s ridiculous anyway because jake would never wear a ring, you determine. you both work with your hands too much for it to be practical. if you were to get him anything, it would have to come on a necklace, like you’ve seen in countless films jake has shown you down the years. it would be out of the way, but still visible, definitely visible, and conspicuous and obvious.

you force yourself away from the window and swallow your urges. when you go home, you tuck yourself into your work and tell jake you’re fine when he holds your- gloved, but bare- hands under the desk.

jake doesn’t belong on a chain. )

  
  


Jake took over your house and, in most ways, you’re thankful for it.

But some part of you, in the back of your head, nags you with concern. It’s going to be difficult for Jake to untangle himself from your life again. Every part of his existence now is so domestically entwined with yours, from his clothes on all floors to his toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet.

Occasionally, in the middle of the night when you stumble into the bathroom to shake the bottle of practically placebo pills into your hand, you check to make sure that his toothbrush is still there.

  
  


(then it isn’t.

you slowly slide back into bed where jake is still tinkering with a small mechanism above his head. his tongue is stuck out in that endearing way kept for when he’s concentrating very hard but there’s a coldness running up your spine that your melting heart can’t quite prevent. jake makes a little startled noise when your cold arms wrap firmly around his middle, turning to look at you just as your leg winds its way through his.

“what’s the matter?” he asks, brows furrowed.

“where’s your toothbrush?” you ask, voice muffled into his upper arm.

jake looks at you long and hard before his lips quirk upwards. “a man can’t have any secrets around here for long can he? fine fine, i suppose a certain klutz may just have knocked it on into the toilet bowl. it seemed like far too much hassle to go rooting around for a new one so late so i just left it be.”

you grunt in response, burying yourself under his arm. your stomach still feels a little off-kilter, a little queasy, but you think you can bear it through the night. the morning always brings clarity.

he kisses your forehead lightly and places the mechanism on the bedside locker before turning to wrap you up in him. “i’ll go to the store for a packet in the morning. would that make you feel better?”

it does.)

  
  


You’re dozing on the sofa in November when something jostles you awake. You peer around blearily, before your gaze eventually travels down. Jake is fully up on the sofa, legs draped over the arm, and his head is nestled right into your lap, his face curled towards you. You think he has to be asleep for a moment before you realise his eyes are wide and peering, just inwards at your stomach. Your breath catches in you throat as you try to stay still and let Jake’s fingers splay out against your abdomen.

Eventually he looks up, unguarded, and soft and something in your heart aches.

This is what you were worried about with domesticity. It comes after you when you least expect it and grabs you by the throat, worrying away at you until all that’s left is something soft and vulnerable; something that will ache if -when- Jake leaves. It comes out between you when you bring him hot chocolate and perch on the side of his desk like smitten associate, and he misses your cheek when he goes in for a half-attentive kiss and all you get is the brush of his day old stubble on your cheek. It comes out when he wakes you, like an exuberant puppy, to drag you outside in the early snow of the year and you shove him down into it and he practically bounces under the poof of his parka jacket, even though his bare knees are blue with frost. It comes out over dry cereal in the morning when he leans across to wipe a lost lucky charm off your upper lip and licks it off his thumb with a wink.

There’s something in his eyes that is curious today though. He meets your gaze steadily, which is rare enough. Usually he’s unfocused, staring at your nose, or your ear, or out the window as he speaks to you. You’ve -after much persuading- accepted that it’s nothing personal, and just how he is. His eyes are lit with something unusual though, that makes you start and bite the inside of your cheek.

“I know,” he murmurs quietly after a minute.

You pause. And snort. “Wow, that’s even more dismissive when I haven’t even said ‘I love you’ first, asshole,” you reply, in good humour. Jake looks suitably stricken.

“It’s not _dismissive_ , it’s romantic!” he insists, a hand coming to swat your cheek chastising.

“Dude, it’s totally a dick move. Han Solo was a douchebag.”

“Who said I was being Han Solo?”

You don’t have an answer to that. It fits a little too perfectly, not entirely in the good ways, and it makes you shift a little before deigning to hide your discomfort before Jake realises the accuracy for himself. You pull him up a little to kiss him and he presses back, enthusiastic in seconds, as he swings his legs around to straddle your lap. He spends a good hour kissing you senseless until your bones go weak from tensing against him and your head grows warm and silent. You could spend an eternity allowing Jake to kiss away your problems, to kiss you until you can’t worry or fear or accept that eternity is a silly thing to conceive.

You try not to let yourself hope this will stay but Jake has such a habit of making you hopeful.

  
  


(after he’s done, he curls on your lap again, holding your wrist in one hand as his fingers pry yours open. you watch, still stupidly tipsy from an overdose of affection that doesn’t have the good sense to wear off, as he prods at the seams of your leather gloves with distaste.

“why do you wear these all the time?” he asks with an audible pout.

“because they’re cool, obviously,” you answer immediately. they’re kind of your thing. jake’s already convinced you to ditch the glasses most days and you’re running out of stupid teenage clothing traditions to hold on to now that you wear your trailer party shirt to your workshop.

jake huffs. “they’re so not cool,” he insists.

“then what are they?”

that silences him for a moment and he continues to prod at the seams before eventually just wrapping his hand around your palm, fingers intertwining. “yours,” he says, defeated, “but very inconvenient.”)

  
  


You’re crunching through a bowl of the horse shoes from the box of Lucky Charms a week later when Jake meanders down the stairs. He pauses in the doorway, fumbling with something, before turning around and going back upstairs. He comes back down a moment later, peering his head around the door before pulling back when he catches your eye. You take another bite, confused.

After ten minutes, he saunters in with the fake casual attitude of someone who wasn’t just flailing outside the door a few moments beforehand. He approaches the back of your chair and leans over your shoulder, dropping a box in front of your bowl. You eye it suspiciously and eventually your curiosity gets the better of you. You push the bowl away and pick up the box. “It’s not my birthday yet,” you point out.

“It’s not a birthday present,” he says and you frown at how his voice cracks, just a little.

You open the box.

It’s not gold or silver, and there’s no visible stone in it. Through the window, the morning sun’s light shines down on your kitchen table but it doesn’t sparkle under it. After plucking it out and turning it over in your fingers, you determine that it’s welded steel. An exact circle of metal, the exact circumference of your left ring finger. It’s perfect and something heavy, like dread, weighs down on your chest.

“Sorry,” Jake says when you stay silent, “It was going to be more romantic but I chickened out. You know me and knees, it’s just-”

“What is this,” you say and your voice is so hoarse that it comes out as a statement.

“Oh!” he says then, and he leans into you. You suck a deep breath of the smell of his shampoo as he plucks the ring from your fingers and threads it through a chain before securing it around your neck with a fumble of the clasp. His hands are shaking and you can feel is reverberate through your whole body, making you shake too. “I thought it would be hard for you to wear this under your gloves, you know. So I improvised.”

“No I mean.” You don’t want to question this. You want nothing more than to turn your head into Jake’s shoulder and breathe him in, dig your fingertips into his arms and never let him go, in a dull mockery of what Jake is proposing anyway. _Proposing._ “I mean. Why?”

Jake blinks in confusion. “Are you honestly asking me why someone would give you a ring,” he says, a humoured lilt in his voice, “I think even you should understand the tradition behind that, no matter how silly a custom you might to try to convince me it is.”

“Jake, what are you doing?” you say, and you can feel the desperation rising in your voice. It’s clogging up your throat with something hard and it’s getting more and more difficult to force the words out past it and the heavy weight settling on your chest. You need to set him straight, to give him a chance before you drag him under. He has to know that he can back out and you won’t be upset, that you never expected him to give you this. You want him forever, in your grasp, in your house, but you _understood_ that wasn’t possible. He must have seen it in your eyes though, when you looked at him with the desperation of a man coming out of the darkness into the sun. You never meant to hurt him.

But Jake doesn’t even falter. He leans in and pushes your chin up, closing your slightly slack jaw, and presses his lips to yours for a split second. Then he’s gone and you chase him without meaning to, bumping your noses together. The ring feels like a weight around your neck, adding to the tremor rising in your chest.

“I should have prepared a speech,” he says, honestly, “I was going to! But I thought it would sound awfully false. You know, like I sound in meetings. You’d see right through that. You always do.”

“Jake stop,” you try again, “You can’t be serious-”

“Oh I’m deadly serious, Strider!” His hands find yours and he brings them up between you both, squeezing them. Something in your chest clenches in time and something is burning behind your eyes, like you’ve stared at the sun for too long. “You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to but, by gum, you won’t tell me I’m not serious. We do a lot of things that are mighty impractical when you think about the mechanics behind our wacky little society, don’t we? What’s a little tradition going to hurt?”

Words won’t come out any more but clearly something is still evident in your face. Jake drops your hands and presses your cheeks between his outstretched palms, pushing your foreheads together. “Dirk,” he says slowly, “I’m not going to ask why you don’t believe me. And don’t think for a second that I don’t know that that’s what this is about! But I’ll be damned if that’s going to stop me because as sure as one of us made little green apples, I’m in this for the long haul. I would be very honoured if you would marry me, even if you just think that’s something silly like wearing a ring around your neck and putting on a suit to kiss me in front of my grandma and then just continuing on like this for the rest of our lives. Even if that’s forever, Dirk, there’s no one I want to spend forever with more and if I have to keep telling you that every day until you believe me then I shall! And I’ll probably keep saying it once you do too. Just in case.”

Something breaks in your chest, like the snap of an elastic band that’s been under pressure for too long. Like something’s been removed, or lightened, or lessened the strain that you never realised was there, not consciously. For the first time since your thirteenth birthday, you cry, openly, wretchedly, struggling to stop as you gulp air like a dying man. Jake’s arms are around you in an instant, a hand clasping the back of your neck as he pulls you in and presses himself to you fully.

And you allow yourself to cling, full-bodied and needy as you wind yourself around him and he wraps you up in his arms, stretching to hold you in as you both end up on the kitchen floor. Pressed together, legs entangled, he soothes you until the shaking stops wracking through your body like a tsunami. With his lips pressed to your ear and your hands clenched in the back of his shirt, you let yourself grow used to the feeling of the ring pressed between you. Your chest tightens and, as if he could possibly know, Jake pulls you even tighter to him.

“Believe me,” he says, so quietly you think you might have imagined it. But you know you didn’t and, after a few moments, you know you already do.

  
  


(when jake shows up in shorts and trips over the bottom of jade’s dress up the aisle, you know there’s nothing you'd rather have forever.)

 

 


End file.
